Computer Applications for Management

Students should have an elementary knowledge of Excel spreadsheets (however, those skills are not mandatory). 

The Curricular Unit of Applications for Management will be taught in a computer room with the support of Excel and the Self Service Business Intelligence Power BI tool.
It is intended that students follow, whenever possible, classes and solve exercises and expose their doubts either during class time or at a time to be defined by the teachers.

The assessment includes the possibility of continuous assessment so that students follow the lessons and themes through active participation in the lessons, promoting the best possible learning experience, as well as the best retention and longevity of the acquired knowledge.

To accompany the Curricular Unit of Computer Applications for Management, elements are available in Inforestudante, both in the original versions of the exercises and in the solved versions, the original ones will have notes on the subjects studied and the solved ones will include guidelines regarding the resolutions of the exercises.

As for Power BI, students are encouraged to carry out work that may be part of their work portfolio throughout the course, as well as to write a report on the various stages of work using the proposed template for the UC report of Internship and Professional Insertion. This allows the student to become familiar with this model and with everything it entails so that future work can take place with greater efficiency and effectiveness. If the work and the dashboard have value for this purpose, conference publication will be encouraged.

The evolution of knowledge in Advanced Excel will be monitored through short challenges. The evolution of the work will be monitored with submissions in each class, which will collect feedback from the teachers.
Productivity aspects related to the tools used are of the utmost importance since, in a business context, providing a timely, correct, and effective response to challenges are fundamental and highly relevant professional skills that we understand will distinguish students when they enter the job market. work.

This curricular unit aims to provide students with advanced conceptual capabilities and practical skills, within the scope of spreadsheets and, in particular, Microsoft Excel Advanced applied to the reality of companies, in particular, in the advanced aspects of using Excel for management, and in the use of software for Self Service Business Intelligence, SSBI, namely, Power BI.

As specific objectives, it is intended that students can:

• use spreadsheets to carry out data analysis, simulations, and automation of procedures.
• develop Power BI dashboards suitable for decision-making by managers and other stakeholders.
• understand and master aspects related to data preparation and quality assurance, who can propose appropriate graphics for what is intended to be represented, and create opportune dashboards for communicating the information contained in the data.

After completing the curricular unit, the student should be able to:

• identify the conditions for using the functions and formulas best suited to solving problems: database functions, date/time, location and validation of cell content, complex formulas, and data segmentation;
• efficiently and effectively use Excel to respond to day-to-day business problems: quickly create spreadsheets that solve real problems, import data from other applications, and prepare data so that it can be used by other applications;
• build dynamic tables and graphs, benefiting from the dynamic structure of action on the data, the options for defining the data table, sorting and filtering operations on table fields, considering different criteria and procedures;
• use the scenario simulation tools, Goal Seek and Solver;
• properly use Self Service Business Intelligence tools to present business information for decision-making, mastering the entire dashboard preparation cycle.

1. Database Functions
1.1. Analogy between advanced filters and database functions
1.2. Functions BDCOUNT, BDMEDIA, BDCONTARA, BDSOMA, BDEXTRAIR, BDMAX, BDMIN, BDDESVPA

2. Date/time and data check/information functions
2.1 DATADIF, WORKDAYS, TOTAL WORKDAYS
2.2 ISTEXT, ISEMPTYCELL, ISNUM, ISERROR, ISNOTDISP, ISFORMULA

3. Data validation in Excel
3.1 Types of Validation
3.2 Types of Messages

4. Dynamic tables and charts
4.1. Framework
4.2. Table formatting
4.3. Data extraction

5. Simulation Tools
5.1. Scenario Manager
5.2. Goal Seek
5.3. Solver

6. Import data from different sources into Excel:
6.1 CSV or TXT
6.2. web
6.3. JSON

7. Self-Service Business Intelligence Tools:
7.1 Introduction to data visualization tools
7.2. Rules for creating effective Dashboards
7.3. Using Power BI to build dashboards
7.3.1. data sources
7.3.2. data import
7.3.3. Models
7.3.4. Dashboards
7.3.5. Publish the dashboards

NAO

Stephen Few, 2019, The Data Loom: Weaving Understanding by Thinking Critically and Scientifically with Data, 2019